Round Ireland in Low Gear (12 page)

It is thought to be here, on what was then an island, that on 2 May 1169 the first landing in Ireland was made by an Anglo-Norman invasion force consisting of thirty men-at-arms, sixty mail-clad horsemen and a large number of archers, jointly commanded by Robert FitzStephen, Hervey de Montmorency (the uncle of Richard de Clare, otherwise known as Strongbow, who himself landed in the area the following year) and Maurice de Prendergast. The Anglo-Normans were recruited in South Wales, most of them young gentlemen in reduced circumstances; the rank-and-file were mostly either Welsh or Flemings.

Others believe that the first landing took place on Baginburn Head on the Hook Head Peninsula, across the Bay from Bannow, and that it was named Baginburn because FitzStephen is said to have disembarked his forces there from two ships, one called the
Bagg
, the other the
Bunn
, which sounds like something concocted by Beachcomber.
¹⁹

These invaders became known by the indigenous Irish as ‘the men from overseas’, or as ‘foreigners’ or ‘Franks’. They intermarried, kept themselves to themselves in numerous castles, and were never conquered or assimilated by the local Gaels, from whom they further isolated themselves by speaking their own tongue, an ancient and unique form of English.

A written record of this language, which seems more difficult to interpret the further one goes into it, is an address presented to the Marquis of Normanby in 1836 at Ballytrent, south-east of Wexford, while he was Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, entitled
‘Ye soumissive spakeen o ouz, dwellers o’Baronie Forth Weisforthe’. (The English baronies were of Forth and Bargy.) It read as follows:

And so on for another sixteen lines.

In this language, of which there were only a handful of speakers ten years later, there are words long since obsolete in modern English but which appear frequently in the works of the mediaeval poet John Gower and his contemporary Chaucer, and, later, in those of Shakespeare and Jonson. One list of them, compiled by the antiquary Charles Vallancey (1721–1812) who, according to his biographer in
The Dictionary of National Biography
, ‘published worthless tracts on Irish philology and history’, contained about three hundred such words.

Their continued loyalty to the British Crown and their rejection of the Reformation gave Cromwell an excuse to confiscate their lands, and grant them to some of his military leaders. It is scarcely surprising that in spite of their antecedents these Old English peasants rose against the English in May 1798. Nevertheless, they
chose a Protestant landlord, Beauchamp Bagenal Harvey of Bargy Castle, to lead them in what was the only really formidable rising to take place anywhere in the country.
²¹
They fought with great courage and succeeded in taking Wexford, which they held for a month. When their occupation of the town came to an end, they massacred ninety-one of the Protestant inhabitants by transfixing them with pikes and then throwing them from the bridge into the river Slaney.

When the rising collapsed in July, Harvey and his deputy, John Colclough, were forced to take refuge on one of the Saltee Islands. There they were found hiding in a cave and were taken to Wexford where they were beheaded on Wexford Bridge, Harvey’s head being subsequently exposed to view on the Sessions House, and his body thrown into the river.

But to return to the original invasion: in the space of thirty years or so the Anglo-Normans overran large parts of Ireland and when they expired, sometimes without male issue, further reinforcements were sent over to continue their work. For defensive purposes the earlier arrivals contented themselves with throwing up flat-topped mounds of earth and then erecting a wooden tower on top. These mounds were known as ‘mottes’ and around the foot of them they had a half-moon-shaped enclosure in which they kept their cattle and supplies. These almost instant fortifications, built with local manpower, continued to be in vogue until about 1200, by which time the Normans had already conquered nearly half the country. From then on they began to build, in large numbers, castles of stone in the Norman style – most with
rectangular keeps or towers surrounded by strong walls. Some castles in towns, such as Dublin and Limerick, had no keep but strongly fortified walls instead; others had a tall keep with a round tower at each of the four corners. With the exception of those sited on rocks, most had a cluster of wooden houses inside their walls. 120 castles or their remains have been identified in the four southern baronies of Forth, Bargy, Skelburne and Shelmalier alone.

By about 1300 some Irish chieftains had begun to realize the threat that these castles offered to their continued existence and began to build castles themselves. There was a tremendous boom begun in the fifteenth century, initiated by the great Norman princes and emulated by the inhabitants of what was known as the Pale, the English part of the province of Leinster, who were offered a subsidy of £10 by Edward VI for every castle built to his specifications on its borders. These were square or rectangular towers of moderate size which also served as dwellings; soon the Irish began to copy them, and a positive wave of tower-house building ensued until around 1650.

And what happened to Bannow, the now lost city? It became the first Anglo-Norman corporation town in all Ireland. According to Holinshed, writing his
Chronicles of Ireland
in the first half of the sixteenth century, the river estuary separating Bannow from the mainland was known as the Pill, a common English West Country name for a tidal inlet. ‘The Pill,’ he wrote, ‘was so quite estranged from Irishrie, as if a traveller of the Irish had pitcht his foote within the Pill [this may also have referred to Bannow itself] and spoken Irish, the Weisfordians would command him foorthwith to turne the other end of his toong and speak English, or else bringe his tronchman with him [what or whoever a “tronchman” was].’ And later, in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, Sir George Carew, soldier, sailor, statesman and ruthless suppressor of the Earl of Tyrone’s rebellion, wrote of the south part of the county:

Bannow was still flourishing in the reign of Charles I, but a visitor to it in 1684 reported that it had been quite ruined by drifting sands. In spite of being buried it still continued, as a rotten borough, to return two members to the Dublin House of Commons, whose practice it was to sit by a solitary chimney, all that remained of Bannow above ground apart from the church and chapel, and solemnly re-elect themselves. And when it was finally disenfranchised by the Act of Union in 1800, Charles Tottenham, Earl of Ely, who had a country seat nearby, was paid £15,000 to compensate him for the loss of this privilege, also receiving similar sums for the loss of two other neighbouring boroughs, those of Fethard and Clonmines.
²²

Inside this silted-up estuary of the Pill was the site of another lost city, Clonmines, where silver and lead were mined. All that remains of the city, which covered twenty acres in its heyday and was surrounded by a rampart and a ditch, are what are known as the ‘Seven Churches of Clonmines’, actually four castles and three
churches, one of them part of a Dominican monastery called St Augustine’s. Further downstream a post-Second World War memorial records ten members of a company of the IRA who in 1920 were blown to smithereens in an explosion in a munitions factory – whether a British or an IRA munitions factory is not clear. Close by were the ruins of Tintern Abbey, founded by William le Mareschal, first Earl of Pembroke, to commemorate his deliverance from a storm at sea. He dedicated it to the Virgin and populated it with Cistercian monks from Tintern Abbey in Monmouthshire.

This particular morning had so far presented us with what I considered in my state of health to be an
embarras de richesses
of history and culture, but in suggesting that we should give the Abbey a miss on the grounds that we had already seen six castles, four churches, one chapel and two lost cities with the day practically only just beginning, I encountered unexpected opposition from Wanda, who is normally not averse to skipping a ruin or two, or even three.

‘If you skip all the time,’ she said severely, ‘you will not be able to write your book about Ireland.’ We visited the Abbey.

I must say, though it goes against the grain to admit it, that as abbeys go Tintern was marvellous. It had everything one could reasonably demand of an Irish abbey. There were huge, gaunt trees surrounding it and drifts of cawing rooks hanging on the wind. There was a massive tower, and the remains of a nave and transept. And embedded in what had been the chancel was a house built by Sir Anthony Colclough, an Elizabethan soldier who was granted the Abbey after the dissolution of the religious houses, and whose family thereafter laboured under the curse of fire and water, which fell upon all those in England and Ireland who held estates once owned by the Church. The last member of the family to live in the house left it in 1958.

The Colclough curse had at least two other, more exciting
raisons d’être.
One was that Sir Anthony found a number of friars still in residence when he took possession and murdered the lot. The second was that another Colclough, Sir Caesar, had flattened an ancient rath (or fort) inhabited by a band of fairies, who proceeded to do away with him in a rather unusual manner. Sir Caesar had boasted to King William (which King William is unclear), with whom he was on intimate terms, of the excellence of the Irish hurlers of Wexford and the King challenged him to bring a team over to England to play a team of Cornish hurlers; and a large assembly of the nobility watched the game at the English court. The Irish were naturally victorious and Colclough then set sail back to Ireland, hoping to make a landfall at Hook Head, where his fiancée, the heiress of Redmond, had promised to keep a light burning in the Tower of Hook, on the Head, to help him sail safely in. Unfortunately, the fairies intervened. They lulled her to sleep with their magic music so that she let the light go out, and the ship was wrecked and Sir Caesar was drowned. After this she converted the tower into a permanent lighthouse, of which a more modern version still exists.

The wind now suddenly shifted to the north, dark clouds obscured the sun and we were glad of our thermal underwear as we plugged on with Wanda gamely leading the field to the ferry across Waterford Harbour from Ballyhack. Personally, I was wondering whether to brave the Irish telephone system and ask Directory Enquiries for the number of the nearest paybed nursing home.

On the far side of the estuary was Passage East, where first Strongbow had landed, and later Henry II, with four thousand men and four hundred ships which, at ten men to a ship, seems a lavish provision. Lying off it were a couple of fishing ships, one Belgian, the other French, taking herring on board from some
Irish trawlers. Clouds of gulls were wheeling over them and the air was filled with their cries of frustration at seeing so much good food leaving for the Continent. Also on the far bank, but further downstream, was the site of what was once known as New Geneva, founded between 1782–5 by a band of Swiss Huguenots, a thousand strong, from Geneva. Their enthusiastic patron was Lord Temple, second Viscount Palmerston and father of Queen Victoria’s favourite minister; and a grant of £50,000 was made by the Irish Government to help them found a settlement and to encourage their craftsmen in gold and silver work. There was even talk of building a university, but it all came to nothing and the Swiss went home.

Later it became a barracks and then, after the rebellion of 1798, a prison, from which a number of captive rebels tried to escape by digging a tunnel. The debris which they excavated, always a disposal problem for diggers of illicit tunnels, was taken away by their wives and relatives in the baskets in which they brought in provisions (it sounds as if it was a pretty lax sort of place). Eventually, it was discovered, literally at the eleventh hour, by which time a number of accomplices were waiting outside to spirit the prisoners away, in boats, vehicles, and on horseback.

From Passage East we rode up a really appalling hill in the direction of Waterford. There, the mile-long quays along the south bank of the Suir were choked with parked vehicles, though still highly picturesque. Twenty years ago they would have looked better, as would the north bank of the river where ships now offloaded their containers at the Bell Terminal, which was now frankly a mess; but then everywhere in the world was less of a mess twenty years ago. Anyway, our interest in aesthetics was for the time being subordinate to our need to find something to eat out of the freezing wind.

We found it in T. and H. Doolan’s old, snug and dark pub
which contained no one but a mild old man wearing a huge uniform overcoat who was drinking tea and a very grown-up young woman who was into the Irish Paddy and hot water, which seemed a good idea in the circumstances. The old man told us to bang on the bar to summon attention, something I am always loath to do in case the publican is on the bottle and comes rushing out to hit me over the head with it. But I complied, and my bang summoned a sympathetic fellow, a Doolan no doubt, from whom we ordered a large port, whiskey ditto with hot water, and what proved to be delicious helpings of fresh plaice and chips.